The First Modern Jew

by Schwartz, Daniel B. ;

  How does this liberal religious vision, optimistic at least in so far as the encounter between Judaism and modernity is concerned, relate to the image of Spinoza in Auerbach’s novel of only a year later? Could Spinoza be reconciled with the view that “Judaism can and will satisfy the higher needs of mankind for all time”?

  IV.

  After concluding a contract with a Stuttgart publisher during his six-week internment in the Hohenasperg fortress, Auerbach completed his two-part novel about Spinoza in about seven months, in what he confessed to his cousin was a fit of inspired writing. “Dear Jakob! What my Spinoza was to me, what he is to me! I cannot explain it, a sacred awe seized me, whenever I thought about him.”59 Though mesmerized by the aura of his philosopher-hero, Auerbach intended the book as more than simply a portrayal of the young Spinoza. Entitled Spinoza, A Historical Novel, it was set forth in the preface as the first of many “Jewish novels” that would comprise a series called The Ghetto.60 These works would complement the historiographic project of Wissenschaft des Judentums, providing a historical-fictional equivalent to the task of preserving images of a traditional way of life before its inexorable decline. “Jewish life is decomposing more and more,” he wrote, “with one fragment after another being sloughed off; thus it seems to me that the time has come to let poetry and history and both together capture its movement in images.”61 Echoing the historicist rationale of his Wissenschaft colleagues, Auerbach goes on to argue that his program for Jewish literature will transcend the mere derision of the eighteenth century toward the unenlightened past. Instead, it will grant even the most absurd of beliefs and superstitions “poetic justice,” appreciating their conformity with the spirit of their former setting. The contempt for Enlightenment negativity is familiar from Das Judenthum. At the same time, there is a new note of melancholy and doubt over the future of Judaism that contrasts with the forward-looking optimism of the prior work. “Nostalgia grips us,” he writes, “when we observe this past; we have lost its old inwardness and only bit by bit gained a new version.”62 What was argued with assurance in the previous book—namely, that even with emancipation, Judaism would remain a vital and essential component of the Weltgeist—stands here under the shadow of a question: With the inevitable disappearance of traditional society, whither Judaism?

  In choosing Spinoza as the subject of the first novel of this series, Auerbach confessed that he had started with what should have been its final installment, since it was Spinoza who had initiated the demise of the ghetto.63 Yet the idea had gripped him so that he could not resist it; moreover, he added, if Spinoza had launched the unraveling of the traditional community, this process was still far from complete.64 Though identified as a historical novel in the title, the book can also be read as a nineteenth-century bildungsroman in its depiction of the development of the hero from youth to maturity. It is meant to span fourteen years in Spinoza’s life: from 1647 [sic], when the fifteen-year old protagonist is first encountered at the burial of Uriel Acosta, the other classic seventeenth-century Jewish heretic, to 1661, when he departs from Amsterdam, symbolizing the final rupture from his place of origin and the beginning of his career as a philosopher.65 A period that in the early biographies of Lucas, Bayle, and Colerus had received only a few pages here circumscribes the entire narrative. Nevertheless, these biographies—particularly that of the Lutheran preacher Colerus—are the main source for Auerbach’s reconstruction, an indebtedness he acknowledges in the voluminous chapter notes appended to the end of the book.66 As he does with Spinoza’s philosophy, Auerbach lifts a great deal that is attributed to the post-1661 period in the early accounts, retrojecting this material into his fictionalized version of the hero’s “years of apprenticeship.”

  The novel traces Spinoza’s evolution from rabbinic prodigy to lonely dissenter. His development is presented as a progressive emancipation from all prior social and religious bonds: from folk belief and superstition, from belief in both rabbinic authority and biblical infallibility, from observance of the law, from family and community, and eventually even from his coterie of non-Jewish friends and mentors. The result is that Spinoza ends up radically alone and autonomous, a stranger to both the Jewish and non-Jewish societies of his era. This alienation is the most pronounced feature of Auerbach’s Spinoza—a fate that is saved from tragedy by virtue of the hero’s extraordinary equilibrium and the retroactive vindication granted him by posterity, which the author symbolizes by crowning him as the secular messiah of modernity in a dream scene at the end of the novel.

  That the bildungsroman would have appealed to Auerbach as a medium for revisiting Spinoza is understandable. The organic notion of development associated with this genre stipulated, as Goethe put it in his Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, that “all that we encounter leaves traces, everything contributes imperceptibly to our formation.”67 Applied to Spinoza, this principle suggested an avenue for considering the significance of his Jewish background to his philosophy that would resist two previously adduced alternatives in the history of his reception, both advanced by non-Jews starting in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. One frame—what we called in chapter 1 the “ex-Jew” frame—was typical of the early biographies of Spinoza; it cast Spinoza’s Jewish inheritance as an antithesis to his rationalism, meaningful only in terms of bringing the latter into bold relief. The other, “eternal Jew” frame identified Spinoza’s Jewish birthright as the essential if implicit content of his thought, presenting Spinozism as a veiled form of Kabbalah or Jewish mysticism. Auerbach, in line with the idea of Bildung, proposed an option between these two extremes—that of perceiving Spinoza’s Jewish origins as a shaping influence in the making of the philosopher, while at the same time as only a preliminary stage in a path that ultimately led beyond Judaism.

  In tracing the impact of Spinoza’s Jewishness, the novel highlights elements within the Jewish literary tradition that foreshadow his eventual dissent. In an early scene the young Baruch fervently recites the first verse of the Shema, affirming the oneness of God in a clear portent of his future monism; later he studies the commentary of Ibn Ezra, where he discovers implicit support for both his growing doubt about the Mosaic authorship of the biblical text and his unified theory of substance; later still, he immerses himself in an investigation of the Kabbalah, finding in its emanationist doctrines kernels of a pantheist theology.

  By making Spinoza’s native literature and society an embryo for his Bildung, Auerbach implies that his eventual heresy is not a simple betrayal of his Jewish heritage but rather a development of earlier paradigms and precedents. And indeed, in Spinoza’s later encounters with freethinkers from outside the community, he stands out for his relative moderation. He rejects the suggestion of Ludwig Meyer, one of his Christian peers, that “rationalism must strive to eliminate all positive faith and in particular all biblical authority,” arguing instead, in good Idealist fashion, that revelation and philosophy need not be at odds with each other, the former often anticipating through the imagination what the latter arrives at via logical demonstration.68 Indeed, throughout the novel, Spinoza often resorts to the use of a fragment from the Jewish tradition—not merely from the Bible, but also from the Talmud and Jewish folklore—to illustrate a philosophical truth. The most dramatic example of this comes in a chapter on Descartes, where Spinoza employs a legend related by “old Chaje,” his family’s illiterate Ashkenazic maid, to point out the problems of Cartesian dualism.69 Spinoza, then, models an orientation toward scripture and tradition that avoids the complete negativity of a ruthless materialism, but instead appreciates how kernels of both can be lifted and guided in the direction of greater cosmopolitanism.

  In this light, the figure of Spinoza would appear to be a prototype of the “practical liberalism” sympathetic to religious traditions that Auerbach had commended in his previous essay. And this is indeed the claim of Jonathan Skolnik, a scholar of German Jewish literature, who takes Auerbach’s image of Spinoza as fully in line with the r
eformist posture put forward in his own name in Das Judenthum. Countering the more common perception of Auerbach’s Spinoza as a plea for Enlightenment universalism against all forms of religious particularism—a view encapsulated in one portrayal of the novel as a “utopia of total assimilation”70—Skolnik argues that such a zero-sum vision of the universal-particular relationship is in fact rejected in the work. Instead of flatly refuting the legacy of the historical religions, Auerbach’s Spinoza combs them for elements of worldly value, seeking to liberate the universal potential that is lodged within the particular. “The factors so decisive for Auerbach in ‘Das Judenthum und die neueste Literatur’ remain operative,” Skolnik concludes.71

  Without denying such continuities between Auerbach’s earlier statements and the Spinoza character of his novel, I want to analyze one scene that I believe complicates their resemblance. Just prior to his excommunication, Spinoza is visited in the novel by one of the luminaries of the Jewish community, Salomon da Silva. Historically, Da Silva, whose real first name was Samuel, was a Marrano physician from Portugal who became an apologist for rabbinic Judaism, best known for his official rebuttal to Uriel da Costa’s heresy.72 Though in fact Da Silva settled in Hamburg, Auerbach includes him here among Amsterdam Jewry, probably because of his association with Acosta. Within the novel, the erudite and polished Da Silva serves, like Manasseh ben Israel, as an exemplar of an openness toward general culture that stays within the bounds of rabbinic law. Early on, Da Silva facilitates the young Baruch’s intellectual development by securing for him a teacher in Latin; now, he visits Spinoza in a desperate effort to prevent him from seceding:

  I confess . . . that Judaism has plenty of abuses and abnormal growths that must be done away with. When I was your age, I was also very troubled by this. The hotheaded youth always want to quickly lop off these growths, but that doesn’t work. You must first seek to win the confidence of the people and not offend them, then eventually you may be able to achieve something and, little by little, carry out your plans. But the first rule is, whoever wishes to effect a transformation of any community in keeping with reason and the times, must never place himself outside it. So, my advice to you is—come back. Think, there are others upon whom the light of reason has dawned who nevertheless don’t throw the old rites overboard at once. Much has happened in recent times: fifty years ago, anyone who would have said this would have been stoned. And thus it shall always be. If you return, you can help reform Judaism along with many bright minds, perhaps as their leader.73

  Though Auerbach’s portrait of this confrontation derives from the early biographies of Spinoza, which claimed that the Jewish leadership made numerous attempts to dissuade Spinoza from airing his heretical opinions—a claim that would be vindicated with the discovery of the actual text of the ban in the early 1860s—the content of his invented dialogue is clearly anachronistic. Jewish Reform, after all, was not an ideological option available in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, and thus Auerbach is truly “appropriating” these figures from their historical context to air a very contemporary dilemma.

  Da Silva implores Spinoza to adopt a moderate as opposed to revolutionary approach to modernization. Yet Spinoza will have none of this gradualism: “Who told you, then,” he replies to Da Silva, “that I want this? Maybe even a purified Judaism doesn’t suit me, maybe I can’t agree with its fundamental doctrines.”74 None of Da Silva’s other arguments prove able to convince Spinoza to defer to the communal powers-that-be. Unsuccessful in his mission, Da Silva parts with tears in his eyes, while even Spinoza is described as “deeply shaken” and distressed.

  When this exchange is read against the backdrop of Auerbach’s prior work, we realize that clarifying where the author “stands” on the issues discussed here may not be as simple as identifying him with the philosopher he so obviously adores. The parallels between the sentiments ascribed to Da Silva and Auerbach’s own arguments of a year before are striking, particularly in a novel where the relationship between author and hero appears otherwise so close. Da Silva begs Spinoza to settle for patiently guiding the Volk in the direction of greater universalism. Auerbach, in his earlier tract, had praised Lessing and Schiller—arguably the two German authors most beloved by nineteenth-century German Jews—for having done just that. They avoided the “elitist obscurity” of the French philosophes who “soared well beyond the emotions and inclinations of the so-called masses”; instead they “moved with loving modesty from hut to hut, admiring the upright virtue of the plainspoken Bürger, seeking little by little to weed out superstition and in the inwardness of faith to establish a boundless tolerance.”75 They exemplified, in other words, the “practical liberalism” lauded by Auerbach in Das Judenthum, and whose exponent here appears to be not Spinoza, but Da Silva. There is good reason to suspect that, in this scene, Auerbach is airing a very personal ambiguity over modern Jewish identity. Should one pursue the path of reform, working patiently and tactically for change even if it means accepting a certain doubleness between conviction and conduct? Or should one imitate the more categorical individualism of a Spinoza, emulating his efforts to attain total freedom and integrity, but at the expense of a nomadic and isolated existence?

  The novel does not end with this confrontation. In the ensuing chapter about the excommunication, Spinoza—cast as a Jewish Luther, only without the support enjoyed by his sixteenth-century precursor—appears before a rabbinic court to answer charges against him. Instead of simply turning his back on the court, which is how Spinoza most likely responded, Auerbach’s hero remonstrates with his accusers, contesting their allegations of heresy on the basis of his own reading of traditional sources.76 He cites select biblical passages, along with medieval Jewish philosophers such as Ibn Ezra and Joseph Albo, to vindicate his argument for the sacred prerogative of natural reason vis-à-vis all other forms of knowledge. “In our reason,” he claims, “on the heights of pure divine thought, here is Sinai.”77 If earlier, in his clash with Da Silva, Spinoza raised the possibility of a total rupture with Judaism, his method of disputation with his rabbinic interrogators suggests that his rationalism might indeed be viewed as a reinterpretation, and not simply a rejection, of his Jewish inheritance. One might conclude that Auerbach wishes to appropriate Spinoza here for the liberal Jewish theology he had advanced previously.78 Yet even if this is so, it should be noted that the conception of reform appears to have shifted. Whereas in his earlier treatise, Auerbach vouches for a reform moored in the spiritual history of a Jewish collectivity, Spinoza, in this passage, grants authority solely to the realm of individual reason and conscience. If there is a reformist view here, then it is only a schismatic one—more reflective of the radical reform position later articulated by the nineteenth-century German rabbi Samuel Holdheim (1806–1860) than of the “historical Judaism” that Auerbach had defended in Das Judenthum.79

  The book ends with a climactic confrontation meant to erase any doubt about the prototypical status of its hero. On the night before Spinoza is to leave Amsterdam for Rijnsburg, he is visited in a dream by Ahasverus, the Wandering Jew. According to a much-traveled Christian myth whose prominence in European literature dated back to Reformation Germany, the hoary figure of Ahasverus had been a living witness to the crucifixion of Jesus. His unnatural survival was a punishment for having taunted the Christian savior en route to the cross, as a result of which Jesus condemned him to roam the earth, without peace or rest, for eternity. Appearing to Spinoza here, Ahasverus narrates his tragic story and deplorable situation, before concluding by abruptly proclaiming the philosopher to be the long-awaited messiah: “You have come to be a redeemer of mankind; me too shall you redeem.”80 Though Auerbach was not shy about inventing episodes in his novel that could speak to contemporary dilemmas of Jewish integration and identity, here he abandons any pretense of historical realism in favor of a blatantly allegorical portrayal of Spinoza. To Christianity, the homelessness of the Jews was their punishment for the rejection and crucifixion
of Jesus, a yoke that would be lifted only upon their conversion at the end of days. By casting Spinoza as the savior of the Wandering Jew, Auerbach subverts this expectation, ascribing to the Amsterdam heretic the redemptive function associated in Christianity with the second coming of Christ. In this new secular messianic myth, the isolation of the Jews would end not via conversion, but as a result of the emancipation from traditional religion set into motion by Spinoza, the first modern Jew.

  One might view this ending as an effort to repair the various fissures exposed in the course of the narrative—between Spinoza and Da Silva, and the radical and reform-minded approaches to Jewish modernization they instance, and by extension between this novel and Das Judenthum. For in his redemption of Ahasverus, the ultimate symbol of Jewish particularity in Christian legend, Spinoza promises an end to the inescapable stigma of Jewishness, one of the foremost concerns of Auerbach’s earlier essay. Still, the question of whether Judaism has a place in this prophecy, and if so what that place might be, goes unanswered. We are left to wonder: Is the enlightened and emancipated society imagined here as Spinoza’s legacy compatible with an ongoing and positively affirmed Jewish difference—with the view expressed in Das Judentum that “Judaism can and will satisfy every need of mankind for all time”? Or is Spinoza being invoked as the forerunner of a fully assimilationist vision of the future that will climax in the dissolution of all confessional identities in a universal community of humanity?